I second cycling. If you have the time for it, it's a great way to spend an early morning on a day off. It makes the surrounding area seem so accessible and interesting in a way that a car just doesn't.

For example, I like to go to our city pool sometimes on the weekend. It's about a 5 mile / 15 minute drive. On a bike it's only about 30 minutes, so timewise it still works out for me. But I enjoy the mental relaxation that cruising through the neighborhood to my destination brings.

I'm here! I am not on reddit anymore, and I drop into the community once a week or so, but I usually read all the posts here.

I started tracking my calories again about 3 weeks ago. I've always been aiming for 0.5-2lb/week loss, but I always ended up cutting too much when I hit a plateu, or drank too much water the day before weighing, and it wasn't sustainable.

This time around, I've been only going off a weekly moving average for actually comparing my weight. Even though my daily weight can look really noisy (±2lbs sometimes) it's showed I've been tracking about 1lb loss per week pretty closely. I wish someone told me this sooner, I devoted way too much energy trying to lose 0.14lb/day

My gut tells me it's definitely an economic factor. I think it's because the netherlands has towns that are close together, so burying 1 km of electrical cable could potentially serve more people. In texas, possibly, a km of electrical cable will go from the road to someone's house

It's in the numbers too. The netherlands, as a whole, has a population density of 424/km2. Texas has about 1/10th that, at 42.9/km2.

Specifically, I think the abilty to make hydrogren from renewable resources at large-scale will change everything. Hydrogen fuel cells are more space efficient, and require less toxic manufacturing, when compared to current renewable energy generation and storage methods. If hydrogen is seen as cheaper or more green than other power sources, it will change the market completely.

Hydrogen generation is also an active research area, and just this year they've have some promising results for renewable hydrogen.

How is this different from what Austin did? Austin put decriminalization on the ballot in 2022, voters passed it, city council make a bill and passed it. Then the state attorney sued Austin which has basically paused everything.